Bloodshed and Green libertarianism – fruits of rationalist beliefs about existence

Previously we considered Immanuel Kant’s epistemology.  We found that he was a rationalist – a person who puts faith in reason alone and rejects the idea of using biblical presuppositions as the basis for reasoning.

In Kant’s time, rationalistic scientists believed that ‘nature’ – including mankind – was a huge self-governing machine.  Kant reacted strongly against being ‘captured’ by the ‘machine’ of ‘nature.’  He asserted, but could not prove, that people had unrestrained freedom – i.e. liberty.[1]

Kant was crying out for meaning in life.  It was a cry of self-inflicted anguish, common among those who refuse to start with the Word of God – the One whose boundless wisdom is revealed in Creation, and whose passionate love for us is revealed in Christ.

Kant’s insistence on unrestrained freedom is also evidence for the bible’s teaching that man is ‘lost’ in sin – born rebellious – sitting at the centre of his own little universe, playing God.  French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers expressed this libertarianism in their literature and art as a desire to cast off civilisation, which they saw as restricting man’s liberty.[2]

Professor Carroll Quigley[3] comments:

“Thus arose the belief in the ‘noble savage,’ the romantic nostalgia for nature and for the simple nobility and honesty of the inhabitants of a faraway land.  If only man could be freed, they felt, freed from the corruption of society and its artificial conventions, freed from the burden of property, of the state, of the clergy, and of the rules of matrimony, then man, it seemed clear, could rise to heights undreamed of before – could, indeed, become a kind of superman, practically a god.  It was this spirit which set loose the French Revolution.”[4]

Rousseau’s influence, led to Romanticism, which claimed that what is ‘natural’ is morally good.  It underpins today’s ‘Green’ political movement – especially among the many Greens that were ‘Reds’ before the USSR collapsed.

In legal philosophy Romanticism prompted the ‘Natural’ Law school of jurisprudence.  It was a seriously flawed basis for a system of law because impersonal ‘nature’ is both cruel and non-cruel.  So cruelty became endemic to rationalistic government.

It is chilling to compare the fruit of 18^th century French beliefs with those of 18^th century Britain.  The French chose to believe Kant and Rousseau and were incited to murder a generation of their leaders on the promise of “liberty, equality, fraternity.”  Instead, they got Napoleon, a dictator who emerged – as usual – after the chaos of rebellion.

Napoleon conscripted Frenchmen for more bloodletting throughout Europe.  In stark contrast, the British believed the bible-based preaching of John Wesley and George Whitefield and experienced an unparalleled season of national blessing.

The cruelty endemic to rationalistic government has now reached gargantuan proportions.  In the 20^th century 24 million people died in battle in the two world wars, but six times more – a staggering 156 million – were killed on the orders of their own rationalistic governments.[5]